The Great Rift (10 page)

Unable to climb or even stand, Lira clawed her way through the rubble to the water pooling at the back of the hold, where she wetted down sheets and used them to mask her mouth against the smoke swirling down from above. For hours, she slept fitfully atop a crate, waking when fire and flooding plunged the ship's bow into the rocky river bottom. The flames went out. Below the hatch, she tried piling up crates into a makeshift staircase, but she was far too tired; she tried tying a thin rope to a knife and hooking it over the edge, but it never lodged deeply enough to hold her weight. Instead, she curled up in the cotton sheets in the dark and the cold, where she resolved to die.

"You saved my life," she finished. "That makes it yours."

"Excellent. I could use another life or two."

A vein stood out from her pale brow. "I'm not kidding. I literally owe you my life. I'm pledging it to you in repayment."

Dante frowned. "Let's not go pledging anything while we're still too dizzy to recite the alphabet."

"Are you saying my life isn't worth having?

"You don't know the first thing about why we're here. We could be sailing off to slaughter every baby in Gask. How would your life look then? Pretty baby-killery, I'd wager."

"What
are
you doing here?"

He looked away. "Hunting down those pirates. Probably to kill them all."

She laughed, a throaty thing that transitioned quickly to a cough. "I'm not going anywhere. And not just because my leg would rebel and declare its independence from my body."

Dante set all this aside and pushed on to whether Lira had an estimate for the Bloody Knuckles' numbers (roughly forty armsmen, but certainly additional oarmen, too, though they were quite possibly slaves); whether the
Ransom
had any distinguishing characteristics (unusually large for a riverboat, with a figurehead composed of two massive horns or tusks); and whether her ship had any warning at all as it approached (no—it was as if the night had disgorged it whole). With that, he nodded, patting her unhurt leg.

"Thank you. This could be a tremendous help."

"Do you really mean to destroy them?"

Dante smiled. "You should see what we have downstairs."

Blays waited outside the cabin, peering through the doorway as Dante exited. "She's awake?"

"And overflowing with useful intelligence about the Bloody Knuckles." He gazed about the crisp cold morning, searching for the captain. "I think they carry a sorcerer with them."

"Oh? Did she relate stories about a perversely morbid youth with a handsome, dashing friend?"

"The
Ransom
sounds sneakier than the Mallish pox. Maybe it's got an expert crew—and maybe they have someone who can make a whole ship disappear."

After relaying Lira's info, it required little work to convince Varlen to double the night watch. Even so, Dante napped through the day, rising at the red clouds and shadowy cliffs of dusk to sit in the prow. He asked Blays to join his nightwatch; with no discussion whatsoever, Mourn joined them, too, providing blankets and black tea to buttress them against the cold night winds, acts which bought Dante's favor well enough not to tell the norren he was completely unnecessary. Not that the whole business was anything but a hunch—but the river was wide enough and the
Boomer
's crew knowledgeable enough of it to sail all night, cleaving to the river's middle, sails stricken, propelled by the current.

Dante stared every time a fire gleamed in the darkness, imagining lamps hanging from the prows of enemy galleys slinking through the night. But they turned out to be nothing but campfires, of course, travelers along the road that paralleled the river, or the lanterns of the villages spotting the banks every few miles. The river tricked him, too: the wash of the waves was as regular as the stroke of oars, and for long stretches he strained his ears against the darkness, peering for glimpses of the ship that must be bearing down upon them, its shining ram plowing a foamy furrow through the waves.

"Tell me more about Josun Joh," he said to Mourn one night, as much to break himself from these paranoid visions of midnight fleets as to better understand the norren's relationship to their god. "Does he speak to everyone?"

Mourn glanced up from his papers; he was working on a treatise that the movement of the heavens were fueled by a regular input of sorrow, which was why the gods had created man in the first place. "No."

"Then who does he speak to? Orlen? Vee?"

'Mostly. Not exclusively." He blew on the ink shining on his parchment. "He speaks to travelers sometimes. Scouts. He's sympathetic to anyone alone and away from home, you see."

"When he speaks, is it just to the one person? Or can he be heard by anyone standing nearby?"

"Only the recipient. Why?"

"I'm trying to figure out whether anyone can vouch for what's claimed to be said."

"In other words, could Orlen be making up visitations to advance his own agenda."

"More or less." Dante grinned. "Neither more nor less, actually. Exactly that."

Mourn set down his papers and gazed at the black waters with an expression that was cousin to a frown. "Humans do that, don't they? Put themselves ahead by making up whatever they want about their most sacred beliefs. Cheapening everything with false prophecy. Well, we don't. Not about Josun Joh. When he speaks, it's to save our lives."

Dante's natural instinct was to question that—in fact, to mock it—but there was an earnestness to Mourn that made his claim approach credence. It wasn't that norren never lied, or were too rarefied to consider manipulating others through their beliefs. But there did seem to be a level they just wouldn't stoop to. Perhaps it came from being bullied, enslaved, and slaughtered by the kingdoms of men for so long that the notion of betraying each other's deepest trusts had become as anathema as barbecuing your own newborn. Perhaps they were simply different, baked from a different blend of the nether that rose in men's souls. Whatever the case, it wasn't that Dante could rule out the idea that Orlen could be lying. He just didn't think it was the
most
likely explanation.

He slept at dawn, rising a few hours later to check on Lira, whose face, once paled by the experience of looking Death in the eye, had resumed an olive shade rather close to Dante's own. Varlen had seen no further sign of shipwrecks. That afternoon, they set to port in Honder, a thriving norren city with a healthy human minority, a city that embodied the late days of winter: a cliffside place of mist, frost, and starkly high, cone-capped towers. There, they took on fresh water and the crew swabbed belowdecks while the clan, smelling rather righteous after days cooped downstairs, bathed in the frigid waters, splashing and laughing at each other's hairy bodies. Dante, Blays, and Mourn checked in at a portside tavern for word of the Bloody Knuckles, finding the news matched Orlen's word from Josun Joh—the
Ransom
was last seen far downstream, by all indications bound for Gask's human lands.

That was enough for Blays, who retired for a nap once the stars turned to the small part of the morning. Dante remained in the prow, accompanied by a blanket and tea gone cold. In his heart, he knew he was only feeding his own unreason; the captain had his own sailors out on watch, men plenty used to the noises and darkness of the riverway, less prone to imaginary glimpses of hostile faces or cruelly curved figureheads appearing from the misty drapery. Even so, he remained, watching the waves, using the idle hours to contemplate the ways to let Setteven know the bow was in service of supporters of the norren without exposing that it was specifically Narashtovik doing the supporting.

Hours later, darkness moved on the waters. Dante leaned forward, as if that would bring him any closer to what he was seeing, blanket slipping from his shoulders. The mist had thinned to something more felt than seen, and the gappy clouds showed stars by the dozen. It wasn't a shape
on
the water that was dark: it was a patch of the water itself, blank as a cave. Nearby waves flashed pricks of reflected starlight. Waters had strange textures to them, of course. Dante had spent enough time looking down on Narashtovik's bay to see the ocean, through some function of the light, banded with light and dark strips of blue. At times, parts of the surface nearly boiled with fury while others washed on as flatly as a table.

Running bodies of water, in other words, didn't make a ton of sense to the eye, particularly when you've been staring at them for minutes on end. But after several more minutes, the black patch was demonstrably closer—Dante had fixed its position to a rocky outcropping on the left bank, and while the
Boomer
's course had taken them nearer the patch, the darkness had moved, too, advancing past the swell of rock.

Against the current.

In the gloom, it was hard to place its precise distance; it was only slightly darker than everything else and its amorphous edges blended with the rippling river. Less than a mile away, though. Perhaps as little as half that, and growing nearer. He'd never worked the nether at such a distance—the further away you got, the clumsier and more draining it became—but he brought the shadows to him nevertheless, condensing them in his hands and unspooling them in a dark thread that reached across the water towards the coming darkness. When the thread intersected the patch, the nether disappeared, fizzling away from his command.

Dante's blood ran cold as the river.

With a focus fine as a needle's tip, he tried again. When the forces intersected, he was ready for the unseen attack, holding fast to his thin thread of nether and probing beyond. The black patch was nether, too: a vast cloud given color and shape, obscuring anything that lurked within it.

He withdrew. He pried open the scab on his hand. The nether filled him like a deep breath after a long dive. He lanced toward the nethereal fog, driving into it with all he had, shredding and rending its ties to the physical world, driving it back to its lairs in the dark places of the world. In its place, he shaped a starburst of cleansing light.

In the ghastly white noon some three hundred yards away, a galley slashed through the sluggish current, light glinting from its heavy bronze ram. Above, two wicked horns curled from its prow.

4

"The
Ransom
!" he shouted. "The
Ransom
is here!"

He needn't have bothered. The night watch had already begun to cry out, first in wordless animal surprise, then in the coded language of a ship at war. Ahead, the
Ransom
's oarsmen redoubled their beat, thrashing the waters. Varlen's voice boomed through the night. The ship lurched starboard.

Dante pounded up the aftercastle steps. "They're going to ram us!"

"No shit," Varlen rasped.

"Flaming arrows, too."

"Oh shit."

"And a sorcerer."

The captain flung up his pudgy hands. "Lyle's bruised balls! What hell have you sailed us into?"

The
Boomer
continued to veer right. A hundred yards away, the
Ransom
matched course, its captain roaring orders that echoed between the cliffs. Against all instincts of self-preservation, Dante raced down the steps towards the prow, joined along the way by an armed and sleep-angry Blays.

"What's going on?" Blays called.

As he raced by, Dante gestured to the men hauling ropes and canvas through the rigging. "I think those shouts translate to 'We're about to be murdered.'"

He pulled up to the railing. Blays leaned over next to him, gaping at the oncoming vessel. "It looks like we're about to be rammed."

"Yep."

"Then what the fuck are we doing up here? Drawing them a target?"

"We're here to stop them." Water splattered from oars, spilling off the
Ransom
's glinting ram. The galley closed, impossibly fast yet horribly slow. A lone silhouette ran from the rail of its high topdeck. A voice bellowed through the darkness; the oars retracted from the water, slipping smoothly through the slots in the hull. The ship hurtled closer and closer, as massive as the wing of a castle. Dante grabbed hard to the rails.

The
Ransom
gashed by mere feet away, near enough that anyone on its deck could have leapt down to the lower
Boomer
. Its crew was braced for impact, though, and Dante didn't see a single enemy face as the ship's slick wooden hull whisked by, stirring the cold freshwater air. The
Boomer
's crew groaned in relief at the miss. The topdeck of the
Ransom
blossomed with a string of tiny orange fires.

"Get down!" Dante shoved Blays to the deck and followed him down.

Blays socked him in the shoulder. "Ask next time!"

Lines of light creased the sky. The flaming arrows whacked into the deck, slashing through the sails. One thumped into the prow feet behind Blays. A man fell screaming from the rigging and thudded on the deck.

Men with buckets rushed to douse the flames. The warriors of the Clan of the Nine Pines swarmed from below, bows in hand. Others carryied heavy furs taken from the walls of their yurts which they draped over the railings. The archers took up behind the makeshift screens, pelting the men on the
Ransom
with return fire. Dante narrowed his eyes and focused the nether. Flame leapt up from the rear of the enemy vessel. It was quenched before Dante made it five steps toward the stern.

The two boats carried their opposite ways, firing arrows back and forth across the widening gap. The
Ransom
's oars dipped back in the water and the ship began the slow business of circling around. Dante neither saw nor felt further sign of the Bloody Knuckles' sorcerer. By the time the
Ransom
came about and took up chase, the two boats had fallen out of bow range; the enemy still took the occasional shot, gauging range with their fiery arrows.

"Ugly," Blays said.

"What?"

"The deck of this ship once they start boarding it."

"Suppose I'd better fetch my sword." Dante started for the staircase down. "Oh, don't forget. Leave at least one of them alive to torture the slaves' location out of."